To plan retirement properly, you need to enter the most complete financial picture you’ll ever assemble in one place: Social Security estimates, IRA and 401(k) balances, brokerage holdings, pension amounts, expected expenses, tax filing status, maybe your spouse’s entire financial life too.
Before you type any of that into a tool, it’s worth asking: where does it go?
We looked at the privacy policies of four popular retirement planning tools and compared what they collect, where they store it, and who else gets to see it.
The free tier that isn’t free
There’s a popular free retirement dashboard that Reddit recommends constantly. It’s backed by one of the largest asset managers in the country — trillions under management. The dashboard is genuinely useful: net worth tracking, budgeting, investment analysis. The problem is the business model behind it.
The free dashboard exists to identify people with investable wealth and convert them into advisory clients. The privacy policy — about 8,000 words — describes collecting identifiers including Social Security numbers, using cookies and web beacons for interest-based advertising, and sharing data with affiliated companies and third-party service providers. There’s a “do not sell or share my personal information” link at the bottom of every page, which tells you something about the default.
When you link your brokerage accounts through Plaid, they get read-only access to your holdings, transactions, and balances. That’s what powers their portfolio analysis — and their advisory pitch.
The subscription tools: better, but still cloud-stored
The two most popular paid retirement planners represent a significant step up from the lead-gen model. Both claim not to sell your data, and both give you more control than the free dashboard does.
But there are differences worth noting. One — the $144/year subscription planner — stores your data on their servers and shares it with “service vendors” including third-party AI providers that power their assistant. Their Terms of Use also describe a referral service where using it means consenting to share your name, address, phone number, and email with financial product providers. It’s opt-in, but it’s there.
The other — a $108/year projection tool — is more privacy-conscious. It deliberately does not offer account linking. The community has requested it for years; the team has declined. You enter numbers manually. You can choose to store data in the cloud (encrypted) or keep it in your browser only. That’s a meaningful choice most tools don’t offer.
The architecture that can’t spy on you
RetirementIQ takes a different approach entirely: there is no account to create, no server that receives your data, and no mechanism by which we could access your financial information even if we wanted to.
Your plan lives in your browser’s local storage on the web, or inside the app sandbox on iOS and Mac. Every calculation — tax brackets, RMDs, Monte Carlo simulations, the entire projection engine — runs on your device. Nothing is transmitted. You can verify this yourself: open browser devtools, check the network tab, and watch the silence.
Our privacy policy is about 600 words. It’s short because there’s not much to disclose when you don’t collect anything.
The only personal information we ever see is an email address — collected by Stripe at purchase on the web, used solely to deliver the license key. On iOS and Mac, Apple handles payment entirely. We don’t even get an email.
Why this matters for retirement data specifically
A retirement plan is not a Netflix preference or a shopping cart. It’s your Social Security estimate, your IRA balance, your spouse’s pension, your expected healthcare costs, your tax bracket, and your expected death. It is, by a wide margin, the most complete financial profile you will ever build in one place.
That profile has value to people who aren’t you. It tells an advisory firm exactly how much you have and where. It tells an advertiser your income tier and risk tolerance. It tells a data broker your age, state, health assumptions, and retirement timeline.
Some of these tools are very good at what they do. The free dashboard’s portfolio analysis is excellent. The subscription planner’s scenario modeling is thorough. The projection tool’s interface is best in class. We’re not suggesting they’re doing anything wrong — they’re doing exactly what their privacy policies say they do. The question is whether you’ve read those policies before entering your Social Security number.
Plan your retirement without giving up your data.
Try RetirementIQ →Privacy policies and terms of use for all four tools reviewed, publicly available on their respective websites as of April 2026. RetirementIQ Privacy Policy (retirementiq.app/privacy.html). Bogleheads.org community discussions on account linking security.